Nighthawks
by Vanessa Crispin
Summary: An angel gone rogue and a half-dead girl walks into a diner.


_Author's Note: I recently just watched the first and second movies, and I absolutely love the Gabriel character. Him teaming up with Izzy in the second movie was by far, the best thing about that particular film, and I would have loved to see more of it. This could be viewed as a "deleted scene", or a what-if scenario._

* * *

The search was taking longer than he had anticipated.

Because unfortunately (and he should know) angels can be very tricky when they want to be. And just maybe, his reputation is more than just that –after all, they can sense him coming a mile away. Unfortunately there's not much he can do about that.

Not much, but just enough and then some.

He spoke more to Lucifer these days than anyone upstairs – how this happened he doesn't remember, but little by little, sometime after his hair turned inky black and his eyes became too wild and too cold for heaven, the devil would appear now and then – either to observe or to scold him, always with that curious glint in his eyes. _For_ _what is an angel, when that angel no longer has wings?_

"There's blood on your hands Gabriel, and some of that is mine – you cannot claim it. " that is what Lucifer would say.

Maybe a former part of him would have replied with words. Instead he just barely turned his head and hissed like an angry cat. Lucifer sighed, nodding – the hissing and growling, though primitive, was a far more familiar language to him.

"That is mine too, but go ahead. I'll let you borrow it."

* * *

The talking monkey named Isabelle was giving him a headache. He never got them usually. He wondered if her less than perfect bordering on chaotic driving was worth keeping her living-dead for.

But they both liked wearing black leather – and both had a certain penchant for lost causes. He kinda liked that. Her boy Bobby (David, Jason?) whose soul was in heaven, whose corpse was rotting in a morgue somewhere. His love/hate towards the big man upstairs, like writing letters to someone who doesn't respond for thousands of years. But he was through with writing those letters.

"I'm hungry." Izzy muttered. He restrained himself from rolling his eyes.

"Foolish talk, keep driving."

"I'm hungry."

She wasn't very obedient, this new monkey of his. He sighed long-sufferingly and leant back his head against the seat as his arctic blue eyes peered through the ceiling and into the sky, although it was useless asking the big man upstairs for any help.

"You can't be you see, because you're too dead to feel things like that." he explained matter-of-fact, like you would to a child. For all intents and purposes, she was. She certainly acted like it most of the time.

"I'm hungry!" she screeched, punctuated by hitting the steering wheel with one bruised hand. His paitence was wearing thin. Throwing her a look, he pointed a scolding finger at her.

"Isabelle, stop that! You are dangerously close to making me curse. Just-just eat at the ends of your hair or something, aren't there any cigarettes in this heap? " he asked, his eyes searching feebly for something to occupy the girl, at least momentarily. Isabelle shook her head at his question, her watery eyes once again on the road.

"No. Me and Julian smoked the last two I had right before we..."

And then she started crying. Again. That was just fantastic.

"Oh stop – I told you not to do that!" He snapped, which didn't seem to have any effect on her at all.

She really had the waterworks going this time it seemed. He doubted she would stop even if he did kill her, right there and then. Monkeys were always so over-emotional.

"Alright, a diner – there. Pull over."

* * *

It was sometime in the middle of the night, but places like these were always open. There was no other customers but them and an old homeless man snoozing over an empty cup of coffee.

For someone who was already half-dead and more than a little emotionally unstable, Isabelle calmed down significantly once she was seated in a corner booth with a big, almost decadent strawberry ice cream sundae in front of her. But when he came back from the counter after paying for their little outing, she was only picking at the cherry right on top with a red painted fingernail, her eyes impassive as she leaned over the table.

He might have said something, but she gave him a look – one of the morbidly curious ones, that usually led to uncomfortable questions. So, back to business. They still hadn't tracked down that infernal woman who carried an angel-spawned rugrat inside her.

"When we get to the bank, I want you to look into the computer again." he said, to which she looked down at the floor and muttered.

"I'm not a computer nerd you know." she said, to which he tilted his head at her thoughtfully. They always had to make up new words – humankind was funny like that.

"Nerd….I suppose it means expert?" he asked. But it was like talking to a surly, sucidial, bitter teenager – because that was what she was. She shrugged her shoulders and swirled a finger around on the tabletop, her eyes not even on the food in front of her at all.

"Right, yeah. Something like that."

And then, because she was being so stubborn and quiet, and most of all QUIET, he decided to try something new.

"Izzy, look."

He had seen that the girl liked things that burned, exploded into a million bright lights. Liked the burning flame of a candle, or standing a little too close to bonfires at night. He could never see the whole of them, just these parts that mattered.

He moved his hand over the top of her dessert, the part where the tiny unlit sparkler was, right next to the gaudy american flag. Just by moving his hand over them, they both lit up at once. The sparkler was a little too cheerful for his tastes, but his trick had the desired effect.

Her reaction, though a bit delayed, was surprising. Usually, the talking monkeys would not really do much – they were usually too busy with their own impending suicides to care about what he did. They followed orders well enough, because he left them no choice. Beyond that, they didn't care.

Isabelles eyes widened noticeably when she saw what he had done, at first just blankly staring ahead of her – but then her eyes changed, the bright light reflected in them and after a moment, a strange smile graced her lips. Lucifer must have whispered in her ear at some point, he thought.

"So pretty..." she mumbled, grazing her fingertips over the flames – a little too close.

The sparkler reflected in her dark eyes, and it suited her. Or maybe it just revealed something she carried inside her – that tangled mess that was her heart, what drove her to suicide in the first place.

Not that he cared about any of that. A talking monkey is nothing to care about. Looking out the window, he heard the sounds of metal scraping against the tabletop, and felt a hand briefly tug at his coat sleeve. Gabriel looked back at her, and noticed that she had put an extra spoon on the table.

"Do you wanna share it? " she asked timidly, not really looking at him, her own spoon busy digging into the vanilla ice cream.

He stared at the spoon for a long moment. This had never happened before. A monkey being nice to him. The cheesy 50's music wasn't making it any easier to digest. Why was she being nice to him? He looked up at her, cold eyes dissecting, calculating.

"This won't make me let you die faster, you know. " he said, to which she rolled her eyes and smacked her lips in a rather obnoxious manner.

"It's just ice cream." she said, plain and simple. For a while he just stared at her as she ate. That was also a first – he couldn't remember any of the other half-dead humans in his acquaintance with a craving for ice cream. Or maybe she was doing all this just to delay his mission. It was difficult to tell, since she wasn't exactly easy to read – even for him. But her apparent disregard for table manners was just too much.

"My god, don't kids these days use napkins?" he exclaimed, right after a huge glop of chocolate ice cream slipped from her spoon and dribbled down her pale wrist. He scooted the red metal container with napkins right in front of her, but when she wasn't fast enough (in his opinion) to care about it, he gathered a few of them himself and cleaned up her hand. He was matter-of-fact about it, never once looking up into her eyes to gauge her reaction.

He could never abide bad manners and the casual use of curse words. It was just one of his many eccentric traits. It made no difference to him personally if the girl wanted to look filthy. But she was his, however temporarily. And whatever belonged to someone was a reflection of its owner. That was all it was.

A brooding silence reigned for a couple of minutes, and then, making sure that she wasn't staring at him, he picked up his spoon.


End file.
